PIECES (28min.)
The sixth short film by Jarrod Whaley, PIECES is a darkly surreal cinematic concoction in which three "friends" (Chuck Draper, Sheila Sharifi and Whaley himself) continue playing a bizarre parlor game together in spite of the fact that their friendships have become stale and tiresome. Two of them spend their time fighting over how best to "play the game," while the other obsessively brushes her teeth and bleeds profusely from the mouth. As the day progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the three are inescapably mired in a shared morass of loathsome banality. Their lives have become so closely connected that when one of them finally goes over the edge, the others find themselves dragged along behind.

COMME CI, COMME ÇA (9min.)
The most recent work in the collection, this collaboration with Kelly Moore uses absurd humor and a plethora of video formats to dissect the social dysfunctions of lonely togetherliness.

THE 6TH STEP (5min.)
This bubbling stewpot of loneliness and frustrated expectations was conceived, shot, and edited in just under four hours. Whaley's onscreen alter-ego, an existentially reeling reincarnation of Chaplin's "Little Tramp," rushes downstairs to join some men who are speaking loudly in the parking lot below his window, only to find that the hubbub has dissipated entirely.

TYPE (1min.)
Another microcosm of seething solitude, TYPE depicts an unholy union between a man and his computer screen. The only light used in the majority of the film comes from the flickering glow of a computer monitor and it reflects off of the beads of nervous sweat on the protagonist's head amidst the quick-cut montage techniques of Soviet cinema.

DIRTY URGES (12min.)
This, Whaley's first short, is a voyeuristic peek into the humdrum daily existence of a man with nothing better to do than to succumb to his basest and most banal desires. The things we do when no one is looking aren't pretty.

SLOW NIGHT (5min.)
Painfully long takes depict a man alone in his apartment, languidly slouching in a murky no-man's-land at the foot of the exit ramp into Hell. He absent-mindedly thumbs through a magazine, eats a carrot, and urinates while his phone rings incessantly.

SHORT CHANGE (35min.)
Finding herself torn between a deeply "po-mo" kind of depressive complacence and an obsessive dependence upon her auto mechanic brother, Sara is completely incapable of living a productive life. When she tries in her naïve way to reach out to her brother in an effort to find meaning in her existence, she only succeeds in pushing him further away. SHORT CHANGE takes the concept of the dysfunctional family and removes the parents from the equation, thereby pushing the brother/sister relationship to its very limits.